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Reading with Matthew K. Gold

Before the holidays, I had the chance to chat with Manifold Co-PI Matthew K. Gold, who is Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities and Executive Officer of the M.A. Program in Liberal Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY. I have been lucky to work with Matt for a couple of years now, through seminars on digital humanities praxis and textual studies, on DH tool-building projects like DH Box, on the editorial collective of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, and with the digital fellows of the GC Digital Initiatives. His widespread commitment to textual scholarship and digital innovation, his seemingly tireless support of his students and digital experimentation, and his humility (which he may not even let me mention) never cease to amaze me. I have spent a lot of time discussing Manifold with Matt, but I was glad to get the chance to ask him more specifically about his personal motivations for developing a hybrid publishing platform.

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What matters most to you about Manifold? I think it’s the overall excellence of the user experience. Our goal is to create a platform that will rival the reading experience of a commercial site like Medium but that is free and open-source. I’m excited to see how various people will use it — certainly our primary audience of university presses, but also a wider set of authors and publishers of all types.

Cool. That sounds like a pretty noble mission to me. I’m also excited about our team — we have the University of Minnesota Press, which is doing exciting experimentation on both its editorial and production sides — it’s a Press that’s willing to take risks with the way it thinks about the future of publishing. Working with a partner like that — and with Doug Armato and his team in particular — is a lot of fun.. And then we are lucky to be collaborating with Cast Iron Coding– Zach Davis and his team are extremely talented and very much aware of the latest trends in web development. Manifold won’t feel like a typical piece of academic technology, thanks to the work of Zach and his team.

What’s your ideal reading experience? For me, print is still most important as a reading experience. But I’m never satisfied when I buy a printed book from a bookstore and then “that’s it.” I can’t carry all of my books with me when I go on a trip, so I really want both print and digital at the point of purchase. For me, if I’m going to read a book of theory or criticism, I’m going to be reading it in print, but I also want to be able to easily pull it up on my laptop or phone when I’m traveling or just happen to think of it during a meeting with a student, or I’m doing some writing and I want to refer to it. I want the materiality of the print book, but for access and reference, the online version.

And Manifold is precisely about achieving that hybrid experience. So we are producing print books, but we are also creating web-based interactive texts that open up new collective and social reading experiences.

What are you reading now? I am reading (and loving) Barbarian Days by William Finnegan. Somehow, reading about waves feels like the right thing in this post-election moment–an escape from politics but also a reminder of how to make our way among larger and sometimes brutal forces.

Who inspires your work? I tend to be inspired by my academic mentors. My first academic mentor was Robert D. Richardson, Jr., who is a biographer of Thoreau and Emerson (his biography of Emerson remains one of my favorite books). I’m still in awe of his erudition and research and writing skills. I’m also inspired on a daily level by my colleagues at the Graduate Center and across CUNY, especially by the students I work with.

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After Matt answered all the questions, we had the chance to speak more broadly about Manifold and the features that specifically address readers’ needs. The design of the platform — from the icons, to commenting and annotation, to the reading interface — is the result of careful consideration by a team of careful readers. Moving forward, even as I share more about the creators of Manifold and the reading practices that influence its development, I will be adding a features series to outline the thinking that goes into the various components of Manifold.